CHICAGO — After gangbuster growth during the pandemic, the thriving packaging industry in the United States is expected to grow 2.4% in 2024. That said, sales of equipment will rise at a slightly higher, single-digit rate over the next few years, according to PMMI’s 2024 State of the Industry report.

Overall, sales in the United States were about $10.9 billion last year with imports at about $3.5 billion. Food packaging captured the lion’s share with about 43% of the market.

Normally after consecutive years of significant, double-digit growth, a market tends to consolidate, settle down and often contract. But that hasn’t been the case with the packaging industry, noted Jorge Izquierdo, vice president, market development, PMMI, during Pack Expo, being held Nov. 3-6 in Chicago.

“It’s not ‘wow.’ It’s not double-digit [growth], but we’re growing,” he said.

Izquierdo added that PMMI’s research projected several more “good years of solid growth” ahead with sales peaking at around 8% growth in 2027.

A number of factors have been fueling this expansion, including ongoing difficulties recruiting qualified workers. That’s prompting baking, snack and other consumer packaged goods companies to invest in additional ways to automate their often labor-intensive packaging departments.

“If you look at every statistic in terms of workforce in manufacturing, it’s getting harder and harder to find people, harder and harder to retain them, harder and harder to find the skills that you're looking for,” he explained.

As a result, training has become a higher priority for companies looking for employees with the right skill sets, but the investment in training isn’t paying off like it did in the past, Izquierdo said. Gone are the days when workers commonly spent two decades at the same job.

“Now, instead of 20 [years], it’s more like three years, four years,” he observed. “And if you spend four months training that person, it turns out that productivity … is going to be significantly less, and if that person is going to be there maybe two or three years, the impact on productivity is going to be very significant.”

He suggested that training today is much different than in the past.

“The generations coming in, they learn in different ways, so we need to be ready to share this training material in the right format,” Izquierdo said.

He predicted the current labor woes aren’t going away anytime soon.

“You need to make investments in equipment, in technology that will allow you to keep growing with the current workforce,” he said. “There is no expectation that the workforce situation will be improving significantly in the near feature, so you need plan for it.”